spoiler for swears:

That's a joke, right? Can never be too sure these days

No - it's apparently a real and epically spectacular self-own.

The advice was unsolicited. I rarely go to restaurants. I can be bad at eating at home.

Overcooking chicken to pwn the libs feminists

It's a good thing koalas are near-inedible (due to their diet) or they'd probably have been wiped out millennia ago. They're slow breeders, there are only about 100,000 of them in the wild (cf. 50 million kangaroos).

Maybe you guys are not aware about all the species the Aborigines crushed when they first came to Australia. There used to be a bunch of large animals. There was a sheep-sized echidna, a hippo-sized wombat-like marsupial, and a kangaroo that grew up to 10 feet tall, among much else. The Aborigines arrived and just ****ing ate it all.

Same story with the mega-fauna in the Americas.

I always wonder if that's why the plains Indians were so reverent and parsimonious with the buffalo. Maybe they had memory of their ancestors eating themselves out of house and home - before the ice blockade opened up and allowed them through to richer pastures.

I always roll my eyes when I hear stuff about how they "lived in harmony with the land". The Aborigines eventually reached an equilibrium with the land, but prior to that they absolutely destroyed the place. It wasn't just the megafauna, huge areas of forest got torched to turn it into habitat that provided easier food. So spare me the Noble Savage "custodians of the land" stuff, humans are humans.

**** me, I gotta get my hands on some kanga meat before the Australians eat them all!

The lotion controversy reminded me of this scene from Ocean's 11:

Everyone sucks, but some suck harder. Whitey killed 60 million bison, mostly just leaving them to rot, shooting them from passing trains and such.

Yeah but when I see stuff like that I tend to assume it has not much to do with any kind of cultural superiority on the part of native peoples and a lot to do with the facts that Europeans did not need the bison for food and possessed trains and guns. I'm sure that's unfair in many instances, and maybe Native Americans is one of those instances.

With Aboriginal peoples, the most destructive technology they possessed was spears and fire and they were as destructive as it is possible to be with those technologies. Where people say they "lived in harmony with the land", what they mean is that the land eventually reached an equilibrium with their presence. So with that, and how many times I've seen the enthusiastic adoption of destructive technology by native peoples (dynamite fishing comes to mind), I regard claims of the ethical superiority of undeveloped cultures with the same skepticism that I regard claims of the superiority of their traditional herbal medicines.

Yo ChrisV, on the subject of Aussie food, I just had a Canadian friend of mine complain to me about what he thought was a cultural difference with Oz, but I am skeptical that it may just have been a wonky restaurant. What do you expect to receive when you order "eggs benedict?" Feel free to give plenty of detail. (His expectations were identical to American)

Some 4th world people are cooler than others.

I think you agree with what I'm gonna say, but people have a very wide range of behaviors - cultures have a pretty wide range of what kinds of things are normal or moral and the environment people and cultures develop in shape it/them. People and cultures that are usually at war become ****ty and promote torturers to the head of the CIA and things like that. People who live at peace would never think of doing anything like that. For undeveloped groups things like food scarcity is not just going to translate to different behaviors needed to survive, but part of the mechanism for directing those behaviors will be their morals. That's not to say that the range is infinite. People are not tabula rasa open to any possibility, but their not all the same either.

Anyway, there was huge variation among Native Americans as I'm sure there was/is among aboriginals down under.

Toasted English muffin, poached egg(s), bacon and hollandaise sauce.

It's not that uncommon here to make it with smoked salmon instead of bacon, but they'll tell you if they're going to do that. It's possible for a menu to just say "Eggs Benedict" and then in the description note the smoked salmon, so I could see someone ordering without reading the description and being confused. If someone ordered just "Eggs Benedict" without a description and it was smoked salmon they'd be within their rights to be a little annoyed.

ChrisV,


have you read Guns, Germs & Steel? The basic premise of the book is about why the Europeans discovered Australia instead of the Aboriginees discovering Europe. It pretty much comes down to scarcity vs. abundance of food. Australia had no domesticatable animals, no plants suitable for agriculture and few animals that could be hunted. It's a small miracle anybody survived there.

Yeah microbet I agree with all that for sure.

Have read Guns, Germs & Steel. Pretty boring book imo, some good information but the core of it could have been a long essay. But the more fertile parts of Australia, around the coasts, have plenty of food. That was probably one of the reasons Aborigines did not develop agriculture. Agriculture has a lot of downsides/risks and was a child of necessity. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs & Steel, even famously referred to it as the worst mistake in the history of the human race.

Just watched episode 7 of Flint Town on Netflix, which covered election day 2016 (both for Flint, which had an important measure for police and fire funding on the ballot, and the presidential election). Towards the end, about 38 minutes in, is a very revealing series of interviews with Flint police officers about their feelings on the election. The whole thing is worth watching, but to summarize: (remember, these are all police officers, and the interviews are individual and cut together, not done in a group or anything)

White woman #1: "The white officers voted for Trump, and - you know, I haven't talked to too many of the black officers about who they voted for or how they felt, because I mean, they probably felt so torn, they really did" - LOLOL, aaaaand let's see how that take ages over the next ~one minute

Black man #1: "It hurt me to my heart to see my white brothers on the Police Department, even though they're entitled to their opinion and their vote, to vote for someone who has shown lack of empathy for minorities. How do you justify that?"

White woman #2: "Black officers still have some racial tension when it comes to hundreds of years of oppression. And I don't blame them." This lady's kinda woke, yeah? Let's see how she does in her next sentence:



Black man #2: "What do you mean, 'make America great again'? Exactly when was it great? What the **** time are you talking about? When it was great? Tell me. Because I probably disagree. You know, was it great for who? Make America great for who again?"

White woman #1: "You know, and of course it's gonna make all the white officers look bad. You know it does. And...it's just, it's unfair that we have to be put in that situation." Preach sister, it's so hard to be white

White man #1, who definitely was a Trump voter: "I get tired of racism. I mean, it's just constantly thrown in my face. You know, I work in a predominantly black community and I'm a white boy out of the country. And it's just, I wasn't raised that way." Spoiler alert: ten minutes prior in this episode he was seen on camera crying about how Obama not supporting law enforcement is the reason we're "in this situation", and Democrats represent a danger to his profession (also he and white woman #1 are dating)

Black man #2: "****, even if Hillary said, 'I hate police,' right, still - when you ****ing put her in comparison with Donald Trump..."

White man #1: "Who knows, maybe personally, he is a big *******, I don't know"

White woman #2: "And maybe he is racist, I don't know."

White man #1: "But for me, personally, it was something that had to do with what I do for a living. It had a direct effect on me."

Black man #1: "What about everybody else? You know, sometimes, it just can't be about you."

Was it all cut in that order?

Pretty skillful work if so.

**** man Anthony Bourdain

oh god dammit, **** depression

i've only seen a few of the TV shows but must have listened to the audio book of Kitchen Confidential (which he reads) a dozen times over to the point where i hear him in my head while i cook. it's fantastic. this sucks. RIP

Goddamn, this came out of ****ing nowhere.



Had one of the coolest jobs in the world: Eat great things and travel the world.

His poor daughter too....